John Doe Vs Ultimate Super PAC

John Doe Goes to Washington - WSJ:

In the Republican debate this week the CNBC moderators thought Rubio's Senate voting record while running was a good issue ... Rubio absent 45%, Hilly 83%, BO 89%. We know why how often a Senator votes is important in the case of Rubio, but not an issue in the case of Hillary or BO. Because Democrats have the Ultimate Super PAC -- it is called the Mainstream Media!

What is more, nobody needs John Doe investigations to know if they coordinate with the the Democrats, we had the whole "Journolist" thing in 2010 where they obviously WERE doing coordination, making false charges, trying to find a better way of taking down conservatives, etc -- but nobody really cared.

The left finds it to be a good idea to be breaking down people's doors in the early AM hours, finding lists of donors and investigating them just because they donated to Scott Walker and doing the whole thing under cover of secrecy so strong that the targets are under felony threat to even let people know that they are being investigated.

"McCarthyism" was tame compared to what we have now -- at least the USSR actually WAS a foreign government with real spies in this country! Republicans are just a political party that is not completely in lock step with Democrats ... although sadly, they are not nearly as disagreeable with Democrats as they ought to be from my perspective!

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GDP, + 1.5 or - 1.5?

Inventory Correction Masks Resilient Demand in U.S. GDP Report - Bloomberg Business:

Buried in the news is the 3Q first GDP picture ... a very tepid 1.5% growth as reported. In reading the story though, it sounds like the greatest 1.5% growth possible -- not to worry, the BO economy should not be maligned!

Completely missing is the fact that this is now the 2nd installment of the "New Math" of GDP .... supposedly giving it something like a +3% boost over what the "old tired GDP number" used for decades past reported. If that +3% is accurate, we shrank at 1.5% ...

Not to worry ... just listen to the TP media. Things are great!

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Rubio, Rose, Lies

Rubio Explains Hillary’s Lie | Power Line:

Can Charlie Rose REALLY believe that Hillary didn't lie to the American People about Benghazi being a "spontaneous demonstration due to a film" vs a known terror attack? She admitted she knew it was a terrorist attack in the first moments, and emails to both Egypt and family members indicate that she knew that, yet we have multiple videos of her claiming the "spontaneous demonstration" for weeks, including promising the parents of one of those killed in the attack that the FILMMAKER would be punished! ... He was, he was put in prison!

I understand that Rose is a confirmed member of TP, but does he REALLY believe what he is saying on that video, or is he lying just like Hillary? In any case, the MSM nor Hillary supporters care -- they see the "fake film story" as smart politics given the proximity to the election, so their view is "hooray for our side, and we got away with it!".

Does a nation ever "get away" with allowing open corruption and media collusion in politics? TP is founded on it -- as has been every totalitarian state in the history of the planet. The fact that our dominant political class is fine with it shows that we no longer have what it takes to retain our freedom.

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The King Can Spend

No Grand Bargain, but Deal Is Still a Victory for Obama - The New York Times:

It's great to be a Democrat, a member of "The Party" (TP) with the New York Times, NBC, ABC, Public Media, most of the newspapers, etc on your side. You can claim credit for "improving deficit numbers", sign on to "bargains" where you take no credit for the part that provided some MINIMAL control to runaway government spending, and then just renege on it and STILL be a hero to those for whom there really is only one side to any "agreement" ... SPEND MORE!

The budget agreement struck late Monday between the White House and Congress hands President Obama a clear victory, vindicating his hard line this year against spending limits that he argued were a drag on the economy and buying him freedom for the final 14 months of his term from the fiscal dysfunction that has plagued his presidency.

Lovely.

From the moment he introduced his budget Feb. 2, Mr. Obama held firm on his demand that Congress break through the punishing across-the-board cuts known as sequestration in the Budget Control Act to provide equal increases to domestic and military spending. He promised to veto any spending bill that adhered to the statutory spending caps, made good on that threat this month by vetoing a popular defense policy bill,

Remember all that hard work and pain that the stupid R's went through in 2011 to "agree" with a total and complete liar on these TINY sequestration caps? Well, that was a complete WASTE OF TIME! They are GONE ... along with the debt limit until 2017. King BO can spend spend SPEND!

**ANY** attempt to put even MINIMAL control on the completely insane runaway spending is WORSE THAN FUTILE!!! Those that do the hard work of even tiny token MEAGER controls on the spending juggernaut are "cruel, hard hearted, ideologues, reactionaries, etc, etc". When some meager reductions in the deficit result, those that fought ANY controls tooth and nail get the credit (see Slick Willie vs Newt, as well as BO vs the "sequester"), and THEN, when the caps are summarily removed (so much for "agreements"!), the spender is the hero yet again!

Any attempt at even meager controls on spending gets to be treated as a goat coming and going!

We continue toward the financial death that this irresponsible excuse for what was once a country so richly deserves!

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Computing Cloud Cash Rain and Drought

The Cloud Is Raining Cash on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft - Bloomberg Business:

I've messed around with Amazon's EC2 a bit -- really easy to set up a virtual machine and get it running. I use the Google cloud for writing, blogging, pictures, storage, etc -- for personal use, the advertising model seems to produce a sweet spot of easy to use and cheap. I've been exposed to Microsoft's approach to making their productivity suite -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc into a cloud annuity for them at "so much a month" vs a package that you have to buy every few years. It seems an understandable model.

The bottom line is that  it is raining cash on Amazon, Google and Microsoft, while IBM, HP and Oracle are seeing a drought ...

The trio shares a reliance on technology that comes from powerful machines lashed together in bunkers the size of football fields. These data centers are capable of providing a broad range of services at a low cost—be it Microsoft's personal and business software, Amazon's e-commerce and computing power, or Google's Web search and advertising algorithms. Contrast that with technology firms, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, EMC, and Oracle, which are suffering from slowing growth or declines as cloud operators shun traditional hardware, software, and services.

Microsoft (at least up to now with the "Surface") never was invested in producing hardware. They certainly reaped benefits off the OS lock in for ages, but they developed a strong application suite that is the desktop standard and a strong DB presence with SQL Server that is allowing them into the Cloud.

Oracle appears to have made a wrong turn with the acquisition of Sun pulling them toward the hardware / OS path, when it would have seemed that migrating customers from private servers to servers in the cloud would have been an obvious route for them. HP is HP ... dominant in printers, but never really in computing.

IBM, locked for decades in "computer archeology" with past super success of the 360/370/Z Series and the host of OS and data management products seems unable to leave the hardware / OS connection behind, and has followed the Kennedy Moon Shot space race strategy -- to try to "leap frog" to the next target beyond the Cloud with Watson -- or "The Cognitive Era" as they like to pitch it.

My problem remains. If Watson is so smart, why hasn't it suggested a winning business strategy for IBM by now?  ... in the form of a question of course! I can see where "big data" has advantages -- and will continue to have advantages with all sorts of relational, statistical, programmatic, etc methods of racking, stacking, packing and arriving at "meaning" that allows better business practice. Is Watson likely to be a proprietary methodology all on it's own that companies will pay IBM a premium to have access to?

I suppose it is possible, but it is hard for me to yet visualize a world in which large companies hold a proprietary AI "entity" in house, carefully maintaining, grooming, connecting, improving it while selling its services to other companies as the zookeeper company's primary revenue source.

Our captive enslaved intelligence is smarter than yours! Step right up and pay the man to get Watson to look at YOUR data and give you the answers that you crave for a mere $xxxxx ???? !!!!

Is Watson a rainmaker?
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The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt

http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Ancient/dp/0465028020

I blogged on this once before, but since only a couple of people read it at that time I decided to update and post again.  It is one of my favorite books relative to both ancient wisdom and what science is finding about the way our brains are organized.

The subtitle of the book is "Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom" and the author is Jonathan Haidt. I LOVED the recommendation from the father of the Positive Psychology Movement (Martin Seligman) who stated; "For the reader who seeks to understand happiness, my advice is: Begin with Haidt." ;-) (it actually isn't pronounced "hate", it is pronounced "height" ... but still funny)

I love the metaphor that he uses and the picture on the cover, a shadowy view of a rider on a swimming elephant. Haidt had gone for a trail ride in the mountains as a youth, and has the horse neared a particularly steep cliff, he panicked that he didn't have the horse under control and didn't know what to do. For a brief few seconds he debated jumping off as he realized what he thought was his peril. Of course, the old trail horse had done this trail thousands of times and had no interest in going off the cliff. She calmly negotiated the turn and life went on.

The analogy is to show the the relationship between our consciousness (rider), a fairly recent add to our wetware package (in the evolutionist view), and the vast majority of our mental apparatus honed by millions of years of successful selection. Our chances of controlling "the elephant" (subconscious) by force are zero. Our only hope is to learn how to lovingly train the elephant to operate more as a team with our consciousness. The theme of the book is how this has been relatively understood for millennia and there is much wisdom on how to do this which can now be validated and improved upon by modern science.

Shakespeare said: "There is nothing either good or bad but, but thinking makes it so". Buddha said: "Our life is a creation of the mind". Unfortunately, science shows us that we are biased to think the wrong things. We tend to focus on threats that aren't there and useless worry. Three techniques are proposed for dealing with this problem: Meditation, Cognitive Therapy, and "Prozac" (SSRIs Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor drugs). All of these work to varying degrees and all can work together. The objective is for the conscious mind and the "elephant" to learn to work as a team rather than fighting -- all three methods help calm a nervous or morose "elephant" (subconscious).

There is a chapter on reciprocity, which is basically "the golden rule". It turns out it really does seem to be written on our souls, and there is no better way to get people to do something for you than to do something for them (or in the case of politics, promise to force OTHER people do something nice for them!). One of the big problems with human society is that of the "free rider" -- someone that doesn't follow reciprocity. Sanctions, gossip, and possibly a lot of our brain size is involved in operating as a cooperative group, but minimizing "free riders" -- at least it WAS that way up until Bernie Sanders! ;-)

I liked the explanation of "naive realism". "Each of us thinks we see the world as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us." We see everyone else as impacted by ideology and self interest -- but WE are unbiased!  As I try to point out, this is INESCAPABLE -- the best we can do is be aware of it and do our best to understand the arguments our "opponents" use. If you are in the dominant ideology position, it is MUCH harder to see the "other side", since it tends to be simply discounted as it is less popular, and in modern times we have been drilled to believe that "the most votes is right! At least until they elect "the wrong guy", like Reagan -- then the masses are "manipulated", "poorly educated", etc. Our founders of course chose to form a REPUBLIC not a "democracy" because they agree -- the mass can be wrong!

Late in the book there is a chapter that discusses how we are "wired for religion". Since Haidt is an atheist,  and a pure evolutionist,  the reason we are that way must be "group selection". It turns out that religion and it's shared rules are an excellent way to make much larger groups of people operate more optimally. Even better when it is backed up by perceived supernatural sanction.

I chuckle a bit here -- sadly, that a brilliant pure evolutionist sees pretty clearly that large groups of people that believe in a supernatural God that has provided them with rules that they all must follow even when nobody's looking, and has eternal significance is BETTER, as in "more adaptive". So the universe "randomly" works out so that the most adaptive course of action happens to be belief in God -- so "smart people" should fight that naturally occurring adaptive concept! Perhaps they ought to give up sex as well? (it is also natural and adaptive)

Twist your head over to environmentalism and the LAST thing that ought to be done is "fighting nature"! If it is "natural", the assumption of the left (and science) is that "going against nature" is EVIL! The only consistency in situational ethics is that it is inconsistent.

While Haidt clearly doesn't say it, that means that that Christianity USED to have an "adaptive advantage", which we managed to kill in the west -- really a double advantage, since kids were a blessing and having large families was a good thing. Now Islam has that advantage -- and hmmm, it is on the rise! Doesn't seem that one would need to be a particularly brilliant evolutionist to explain that one!

In any case, the book is EXCELLENT! It is one of my top recommendations for understanding human nature.

Predictions, Strongest Hurricane Ever

CHART: Is Hurricane Patricia The Strongest Hurricane Ever? : The Two-Way : NPR:

We awoke yesterday AM to news that "the strongest hurricane ever" was bearing down on Mexico. Those of us with some skepticism always have the thought cross our mind ... "ever"? Just how long is that?

Turns out "ever" in this case is sometime in the 1970's.

"To make things easier, Klotzbach looked at just U.S. data, and he came to the conclusion that this is the strongest hurricane since the 1970s, when wind measurements are reliable."

Patricia formed very rapidly, it was not predicted to be nearly that strong, so we only had to deal with a single day of maximum hype as to it's likely devastation -- "catastrophic" was a word prominently displayed. Some might question our ability to predict climate decades and even centuries in advance when within a 48 hour period our current weather prediction capability goes from "storm" to "worst ever" to "tropical depression".

We awoke today to discover that there was no loss of life at all, very little property damage, and Patricia is no longer even a hurricane, but has been downgraded to a lowly "Tropical Depression", not even worthy of being a "Tropical Storm".

Patricia, which at its peak was a massive Category 5 storm with 200-mph winds before making landfall, quickly tapered as it crossed mountainous terrain and withered into a tropical storm early Saturday. By mid-morning, it had been downgraded further to a tropical depression.

As always with stories like this, there are two explanations -- incompetence and/or having an agenda. I'm sure this story has lots of both -- the rapid rise of the storm shows how little we really know about even weather, let alone climate. The hype shows how starved the media is to report "massive strong storms" that we were assured would be commonplace after Katrina. The ease with which these are foisted on a largely compliant population shows the extent to which the vast majority of people are simply pawns being told what to think by the dominant political party.

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Politics vs Football

Benghazi and Character - WSJ:

I'm a Packer Fan -- but I have been accused on occasion of not being "true enough" when it comes to some of the officiating calls made. Often I can see how some call could have gone for or against the Pack, but for "true fans", the Pack receiver was always "mugged" even though there was no call made, but when it goes the other way, the Packer defender "never touched him" ... everything is perceived through the eyes of being fan.

In Football, that is fine -- the fans are the fans and the game is the game. There are no "votes" on calls, how the fans happen to see it affects the game not one bit. But Politics was not SUPPOSED to be a game! It is supposed to be an example of how large groups of people can have REASONABLE input to the governance of what used to be a great nation.

From my perspective, Watergate was a turning point. Plenty of Politicians did things worse than Watergate prior to Nixon, but media had grown more powerful and biased, Nixon was hated by the left, and the Democrats were licking their wounds after being so completely in charge of government from '64 - '68 that the Republican Party was irrelevant. It was their time and Republicans thought "it was for the good of the country". It was only good for the rise of "The Party" and a more leftist media.

In the '80s, political attack became a way of life for the left -- Iran Contra and the electronic lynching of Clarence Thomas were the biggest examples. In '88, Rush Limbaugh went on the air nationally, and in '96, Fox News joined the right side of the fray, and the perspective of the right was covered for average Americans. Issues developed two sides -- which the leftward establishment and those that cheer for the left has never really come to grips with. To the American intelligentsia, there is left -- which is CORRECT, and right, which is evil, misinformed, dishonest, dangerous, and needs to be SILENCED!

As the linked article laments, even in the case of the completely obvious -- Hillary knew that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, not an uprising due to a film, yet she, Susan Rice, and even BO spouted a lie for a number of days because they saw it as politically prudent.

Prior to Watergate, one might believe that "reasonable God fearing Americans" of EITHER PARTY would not put up with such mendacity and would NEVER consider someone involved for president, and would likely even seek to have BO removed. Nixon's greatest sin was supposed to be "He lied to the American people".

I would like to believe that we were better once, but it is absolutely clear we no longer are. Is there a lot of "political motivation" in the Benghazi hearings? Absolutely -- as there was in Watergate, Iran Contra, the Clarence Thomas Hearings, Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, Valerie Plame, etc, etc.

THE ISSUE is if there are any political RULES, or if unlike Football, politics can be played with "The Party" being the rules committee, officiating staff and calling the games. As if the NFL was controlled from Green Bay (or some other franchise), and everyone else had to be happy with that.

The bottom line is that the vast majority of the media and well over half the country really don't care that Hillary ... and BO for that matter can lie right to their faces for political purposes. The Party is "their team", so they want everything called in favor of The Party. The Party gives them Free Stuff, assures them that things can keep going on with 10's of Trillions of debt and more in unfunded liabilities, a sputtering economy, and a third of the people not working with more not working every day, and "it will be fine".

So democracy has failed. We no longer care if leadership has even the most basic element of character, that of truthfulness. We are a nation of fans for a political point of view, and the only interest is in "winning" even if we can be completely assured that we can't trust a single thing that our "leadership" utters.

We definitely have got the government we so richly deserve!

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Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei Wants BO Prosecuted

Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei’s Letter Of Guidelines To President Rohani On JCPOA Sets Nine Conditions Nullifying Original Agreement Announced July 14, 2015 |

"It should be further noted that in his introduction to the new conditions, Khamenei attacks the U.S. and President Obama with great hostility, and calls for Obama to be prosecuted by international judiciary institutions. "

The US press was always forthcoming with any idiot from anywhere around the globe that thought that "Bush and Cheney should be prosecuted for war crimes". Naturally, "The Party" and it's media arm thought that was a jolly good idea.



However, W wasn't handing over nukes to such people as BO has with the Iranians --  his buddies ... that want him in jail.



I have to admit that the Iranians seem much smarter on this topic than a lot of Americans -- but who really cares? Global Warming is a MUCH bigger threat than Islamist nutcases with nukes and ICBMS!





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Double Damned Ryan

Ryan’s words show why he’ll be a bad Speaker | Power Line:

The Speaker situation in the House is a classic case of "Damned if you do, Damned if you don't".

I like Paul Ryan as a person, and I think he is generally brilliant -- possibly a bit too much so. I also think he has fallen for the MSM / Democrat play book and thinks that "government fixes things". It does, it "fixes things" so everyone on average has MUCH less than they would otherwise, and a LOT less freedom to boot!

The article is worth the time to read. THE PROBLEM is that no matter how much we conservatives would like to get "the best possible speaker", it is a VERY big problem for the Republican Party to be unable to govern the chief piece of government  that it has in it's power! People don't elect people to fail to even be able to select their own leadership!

The situation is grim -- we have a far left incompetent president, a country that has slouched FAR to the left,  an avowed Socialist doing well on the D ticket with the most scurrilous,  dissembling, unappealing harpy imaginable tacking to get left of him!

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has a reality TV Star wealthy obnoxious gadfly leading in the polls, followed by a very likeable and upstanding BRAIN SURGEON (note, not an executive, not a politician ...).

The Republican establishment is pretty much "Socialist lite" -- give the government growing, maybe just a little slower than the D's ... and then of course we have the Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, etc whose hearts are in what I see as the right place, but whose political acumen is sadly lacking.

Given the situation, I'm starting to think not much makes a difference -- Trump or Hillary, most likely with either we are going to continue to search for the bottom! On the bright side, maybe it will all be over before 2016 and we won't have to watch the election!

Ah, starvation, I need lose some weight. Anyone have any good recipes for roast rat?

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12 Time Loser Kills Black Officer

'Hardened, Violent Criminal' Who Allegedly Killed NYPD Officer With Shot to Head Should Never Have Been on Street: Mayor | NBC New York:

You probably have heard that a NY Policeman was shot and killed. The officer was black, as was the perpetrator. The perpetrator had also been in jail 12 times -- no "3 strikes" there. Even lefty Mayor De Blasio said "He should have never been on the street".

Say what? We are hell bent for election to release 6K multiple time loser convicted felons in short order and passing bills to release 10's of thousands more!

All because the black vote isn't energized enough for 2016 and there are some polls showing Trump getting 25% of the black vote. Polls at this point are all over, but you can bet that the D's are concerned about even the POTENTIAL for a 25% number -- it would be death for their candidate.

Thus, we will release violent offenders and likely lose more officers -- for TP, votes matter, lives don't!

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Redford, Rather, "Truth"

Dan Rather, Still Wrong After All These Years - WSJ:

While BO's "Dreams" book in which he makes it clear that he identifies as a Luo Tribesman carrying on the "Dreams from his father" to take down the Western Colonial Powers -- primarily Britain and the US, remains nearly "top secret" to official mediadom and really all but certifiable idiots like me, W's National Guard record is STILL of interest to the left wing!

There is no need to read the attached -- the summary is that Robert Redford plays in a new movie "Truth" that paints Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes as being heroic victims of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Never mind that the documents they based their "story" on were REALLY bad and proven forgeries, the story was TRUE!

It's a level of bias in thought that is still hard for my brain to conceive. Does ANYONE that talks about that story have a remote idea how hard and dangerous it is to even fly a fighter plane at all? Bill Clinton avoided service by staying in college -- and nobody cares, nor really should they. John Kerry served, but had himself filmed doing it, managed to get 3 purple hearts without spending a night in a hospital, testified against fellow servicemen calling their actions "reminiscent of Genghis Khan", then HE wanted to be seen as a "war hero" .... "reporting for duty".

The fact that the left STILL wants to tell the story that W was somehow a "bad fighter pilot", when he never made his guard service a significant part of his campaigns seems beyond crazy. The very same people who are obsessed with what he did in the TX National Guard care less about BO's past, a never ending litany of Hillary scandals, Bernie writing about woman's rape fantasies, or basically anything relative to their own candidates histories.

It is just the way it is -- consistency doesn't register at all from the left, and any old story can be called truth or fiction to suit the purposes of the left wing narrative.

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Raising The Crime Rate

Heather Mac Donald Explodes Criminal Justice Myths | Power Line:

As I've posted previously, Congress is busy trying to raise the crime rate by releasing many thousands of convicted felons. The narrative on this one is:

1). We have too many in prison due to drug laws that are too strict

2). Since too many prisoners are black, the system must be racist.

The 5 min video in the attached is worth watching -- Heather McDonald is very impressive.

Violent crime is already on the rise, the police are more regularly under attack than they have been since the '70s -- seems like an odd time to release a bunch of felons.

Why is this legislation being considered?

1). Democrats need to energize their Black Voters -- "Black Lives Matter" and this legislation work well together.

2). The fact that Democrat welfare policies clearly destroyed the black family in the '60s and that the eruption of the drug and criminal culture is an outgrowth of that is an inconvenient truth that needs to be suppressed. Blaming racism in the criminal justice system is a better narrative for Democrats.

3). The water on this bill has already been carried by the MSM. It generally doesn't affect the Red States represented by Republicans that much, so there is a large temptation to give the D's what they want.

Other than the fact that it is likely to make our major cities into increasingly violent hell holes which is terrible for those that live there -- especially poor inner city minorities, my largest concern is that this bill is likely to put gun violence back on the increase which will then be used to make the claim that "more guns create more violence", a statistic that has stubbornly gone DOWN while the number of guns has gone up in the last 20 years.

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Sex, Drugs and Socialism

Can the Democrats Mainstream Socialism? | Power Line:

Can the Democrats Mainstream Socialism?

Of course -- they have been doing it for about 100 years now, lately they haven't even been very incremental about it. The really unfortunate fact is that unlike at least the population effects (though not the individual) of drugs and free love, Socialism tends to leave a very permanent mark -- like a 100 million+ dead kind of mark.

I found these paragraph to be the top from the linked article:

One lesson we have learned over the years is that the Left never gives up. No defeat is permanent. Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. He was innocent! The Rosenbergs were executed. They were framed! Mary Mapes and Dan Rather were fired. Their Texas Air National Guard story was a model of investigative journalism! Socialism has killed more than 100 million people, and impoverished countless more. Let’s give it another try!

Christians are the same on Christ as Socialists are on their preferred system of eventually totalitarian government. The difference is that Christianity generally works well in even THIS world!

Big redistributive government is the Socialist RELIGION and they are TRUE BELIEVERS! It doesn't make any difference how many times they have been wrong, they believe that they are SURE to be right THIS time! Utopia is at hand!

Hollywood just tried another Peter Pan movie ... "Pan". It failed miserably, but the idea of "never growing up and facing reality" is as old as man. New generations, and even people that should know better try to live lives based on "Sex, Drugs and Socialism" (Rock and Roll and Socialism go together pretty well too).

They end up with diseases, rehab, near death or death experiences -- Lamar Odom / Jimmy Hendricks, etc, broken lives, damaged children, etc like day follows night.

Socialism takes a bit longer, but the damage is deeper and wider. The belief in Socialism is a religious belief -- it doesn't succumb to mere fact.

But it always ends when the money runs out -- other peoples, borrowed, ALL OF IT! Then somebody picks up the pieces (and usually the bodies) of another broken utopian dream.


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Obama Supporter Dislikes Republicans

Sweet Jesus, David Brooks is finally making sense: How Fox News & the GOP insanity caucus pushed him over the edge - Salon.com:

Finally? The man wrote multiple columns in support of Obama. He did EVENTUALLY have a bit of "buyers remorse", but seriously. If you are as far left as he is, it takes someone as far left as the NYTs or Salon to consider him a "conservative".

So he is worried about the "Freedom Caucus" in the house because it is "too extreme". Really. Has he ever looked at the Black Caucus? Is he aware that there is an avowed socialist running on the Democrat ticket for President and doing pretty well?

Apparently it is all "Rush Limbaugh's fault".

What David Brooks apparently liked -- if he actually as ANY "conservative" bones in his body is the old Pre William Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, etc "Rockefeller conservatism" of green eyeshade balanced budgets and isolationism. A few "tokens" in office from time to time that couldn't get anything through congress because the Democrats held it for 50 years was the kind of "healthy opposition party" that they liked.

A toothless old lion kept sedated in it's cage that they could poke with a stick now and again.

Now this Republican party is supposed to be "revolutionary" -- they can't even put up a bill to defund the government paying half a billion a year to kill babies so BO can veto it !

Wow, "revolutionary" is a hard word to attach to that kind of spinelessness!



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New New Deal

Hillary Clinton & Democratic Debate -- Calling for a New New Deal Is Nothing New| National Review Online:



Generally a good and entertaining column by Jonah, but what really hit me is this as the summary:

It’s all just so exhausting. And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.

It is indeed exhausting -- and sad. As he makes clear in the column, the "New Deal" wasn't new when it happened -- it was re-cycled Wilson WWI government centralized planning, which was stolen from Germanic Bismarkian Socialism of the 1880's, which was ... oh well, you get the idea. The concept of "wouldn't a free lunch be nice" is as old as Adam and Eve.



The results are predictable too -- like gaining weight at the holidays, hangovers, spending too much money, etc, etc -- we know the result, but we have an oh so human tendency to keep thinking "it's different this time".





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Dayton vs Walker

Minnesota vs. Wisconsin: Does the Progressive Paradise Win? | Power Line:



Mostly posting to keep track of the reality of the rather popular left wing meme that Minnesota is a "Progressive Paradise" and "Scott Walker Destroyed Wisconsin". Walker was elected in 2010, Dayton in 2011.



Building and destroying businesses takes a few years, and legislatures have an awful lot to do with it as well. Dayton has been "held back" if you are a D, or "prevented from destroying" if you are an R by having to deal with at least one house in Republican hands.



The bottom line is that it is hard to find any significant change in the trend lines in either state at this point.



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NY Times Danish Reality

Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault - The New York Times:

The picture meme isn't in the article ... but it should be!

I covered the insanity of BS (Bernie Sanders) thoughts on Denmark relative to the debate here. When you get far enough out on the left that even the NYTs thinks you have slipped the surly bonds, nature is telling you that you are a few sunflower seeds short in your trail mix!

Not a bad article -- you can almost see reality from there, high praise from me for the Times! A sample:

"With little fuss or political protest — or notice abroad — Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating. But Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them. "

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"Killing" Reagan, Patton, Books

Killing O’Reilly’s Reagan | Power Line:

I've read two of the Bill O'Reilly's "Killing" series -- Patton and Reagan. Both are pretty much "National Enquirer" / "People" / made for TV kind of fairly lurid, sensationalized and highly fictionalized works that are extremely light and easy reads. Apparently O'Reilly and his ghost author are highly interested in sexual dalliances -- both works were rife with them, shoestring coincidental connections, rumors, gossip, etc. -- or they merely believe that is what sells, which I guess I would be an example of ( I borrowed one, got the other as a gift).

I DID find them entertaining -- which there is nothing wrong with in its place as long as people don't start believing that what they are reading is in any way "real", just because it purports to be.

Sometimes people that read my blog assume that I watch a lot of Fox News. I don't -- I watch very little of it because in general, it is PRIMARILY concerned with ratings and making money, which I and Steven Hayward believe that Bill O'Reilly is as well. Again, I'm fine with that -- until the Bernie Sanders way completely takes over, private business needs to be concerned with finding a niche and making money. NPR would be concerned about that as well if they didn't feed at the public trough and rely on lots of left wing donors to support their coverage for the left and the far left view of the world.

A lot of the Reagan books assertions we have heard before -- primarily from Kitty Kelly, Nancy and astrology, Alzheimer's while he was in office, affairs for both of them, etc. -- and as Hayward points out, they have all been solidly debunked before from real sources rather than rumors.

If you don't read much history, you may actually learn something from the books, but like pretty much anything (and more in this case), be pretty critical of the most titillating stuff. Kind of like the fishing lure that really achieved it's purpose once you bought it (catching a fish is purely optional!), the book is entertaining and people are buying it. That is what counts in the game that O'Reilly is playing here -- think of them as a male version of a "Romance Novel" and enjoy in moderation.

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Eyes On Balls

Obama Gets a Clue? | Power Line:

In the linked PL column there is the hope that BO's decision to more or less "stay the course" in Afghanistan constitutes his waking up and realizing what is happening in the world. Unlike the claim made for Carter in the column, I really don't expect BO to be reading Churchill any time soon. The PL guys do a good job of being hopeful.



How many times did we hear from say 2003 on that W had "taken his eye off the ball on Afghanistan"? Thousands at least.



BO tried to "lead from behind" (behind W) and attempt a "surge" in Afghanistan. His Afghanistan casualties exceeded 2x W's in 2014 . I covered how little of the deaths were reported here -- now we see how sadly this policy is failing in Afghanistan.



So the sacrifice we made in Afghanistan in lives and treasure is too precious to walk away from but Iraq wasn't? Am I the only one that would like to hear BO explain the logic of why THAT is??? If you look at the location of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Europe -- let alone Israel for those of us who care, WHY is it that Afghanistan is of greater strategic importance than Iraq? Obviously, it is not -- not that we ought to allow it to become a haven again, but Iraq is far more strategic.



Is it even possible for the MSM to sustain any criticism of BO? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Crimea and Syria. Where is US foreign policy not a complete disaster? Nowhere -- it's a consistent disaster everywhere!



90% of the media is simply part and parcel of "The Party - Democrat" -- we may as well be the old USSR and call of "Pravda" (Russian for truth).



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Black Votes Matter

How The Democratic Presidential Candidates Responded To The Black Lives Matter Question | ThinkProgress:

One of the marks of a totalitarian system is its ability to get all its adherents to mindlessly utter some phrase or make some sign. "Heil Hitler" is an example, now we have "Black Lives Matter".

On the left there is some disappointment that Hillary didn't jump up and make the statement like BS did.

Civilized free people believe that all human lives matter -- "All lives matter" for short. Including Police, babies, even white people!  Can't be saying things like THAT if you are a Democrat!

When your freedom is removed you are required to repeat a phrase like a trained parrot -- just like the parrots on stage last night.

The Democrats need an energized Black Voter base to show up in enough numbers so they can have some justification for the volume of fraud they need out of those districts. If the polls are empty it is going to be hard to claim that 150% of the voters showed up at the polls!

Black votes are like the conventional explosive in a nuclear weapon used to compress the fissionable material to create the runaway nuclear reaction -- you have to have enough Black Voters show up to allow your massive Democrat nuclear fraud machine to manufacture 10's of thousands of votes in our larger cities!

So they matter to Democrats BIG TIME!

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BS Flavored Danish

Scandiphilia and Income Inequality | Power Line:

Good summary at PL on the fact that the Scandinavian welfare paradise that BS (Bernie Sanders) imagines to exist ran out of other people's money a while back and they have had to adjust. It turns out that you can't kill ONLY the golden goose (the 1%) to pay for your "Free Stuff", you have to dredge up some serious chicken feed from all the barnyard prisoners -- like a 25% VAT tax on everything you buy!

Canada has been forced to adjust similarly, and in fact both Canada and Denmark are now more free and better places to do business than the old US of A! We do indeed hate big money grubbing corporations, and we have been proving it by sending them packing with high taxes and anti-business regulation for a few decades already! No wonder our level of workforce participation is back to mid 1970's levels!

Here is some data on Denmark specifically if you want to scrape a little BS off your Danish!

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Nearing "The Day After Tomorrow"

We’re closer to a ‘Day After Tomorrow’ ice age than we thought - The Washington Post:

The article is worth a read for at least entertainment value, but the bottom line is that the Warmists are hedging their bets with the idea that the "pause" in warming now nearing 20 years in length might quickly slip into COOLING! ... ****BUT**** !!!!!

Yup, you guessed it, that cooling will be CAUSED by warming, which is caused by humans and CO2. Such has been "settled". As Karl Popper pretty much tautologically said: "A theory that explains everything explains nothing".

That used to be trotted out by atheists against God for obvious reasons, but if "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" explains ALL things that happen to the climate, then it really explains nothing.

If you look at the tired old Vostok ice core data, our temps have peaked 4 times previous to this time in the last 500K years and then plunged. None of our current historical models include advanced carbon burning civilizations in the previous peaks, so while it is possible we are having an effect, it seems pretty clear that the planet warms in 100K year cycles and spends most of it's time far cooler than it is now.

As least future generations will have the satisfacting of knowing that in this case, the cooling was caused by humans!

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Moral Ecology, Naming Disaster

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/10/donald-trump-and-the-decline-of-americas-moral-ecology.php

The linked column chooses to name our moral decline as "Moral Ecology" based on an article from David Brooks. As "Closing Of The American Mind" might say, the morals you make up are a lot less likely to be really believed than the ones that are a few thousand years old. Make it so nearly nobody believes that how they live has the potential to affect how they spend eternity, and "morals" become "suggestions".

"Suggestions" to the real "god" of the modern world, and especially America -- **ME**!!! David Brooks identifies the problem in this following quote, but unless people have been totally asleep or so far into denying the obvious to miss that BO is a narcissist beyond previous imagination for an American President, this isn't very newsworthy. Sure, "The Donald" is another of the species, but in a nation that gets all thrilled over the Kardashians, the person formerly known as Bruce Jenner, etc, etc, the cult of me is considered to be high moral fiber, so who can really be surprised?

Over the past several decades we have built a moral ecology around the Big Me, around the belief in a golden figure inside. This has led to a rise in narcissism and self-aggrandizement.

So we have shooters that "just want to be famous".  When there are no morals or even standards, fame is just about all their is. Wealth is bad if you aren't famous -- but fine if you are.

At one time kids wanted to be astronauts, now they want to be mass killers. For "progressives", that must be progress. The latest is always best -- or is it possible that "progress" sometimes isn't?

Closing Of The American Mind, Allan Bloom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind

After a lot of rememberance (some of it false), I re-read the book that along with National Review and Ayn Rand was one of the early works that led me to "open my mind" to the ancients, the classics, philosophy and the radical ideas of thinkers not sanctioned by the modern academy or culture. Call it the inverse of the kind of relativist, collectivist,  politically correct education that Bloom laments in this work. I find the following explains the title and purpose of the work.

"Actually openness results in American conformism -- out there in the rest of the world is drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the lifestyles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life." 

The book is a survey of the leading thoughts to Western civilization and what has become of them in the American University. The basic answer is that there is no truth, and therefore all points of view are somewhat equivalent, although the most "progressive" is favored, since it is current. Science is king -- but alas, Science has no values or meaning  beyond "it works" and "we have lots of detailed data about stuff", so thought is atomized along with matter. The post Nietzsche world of philosophy is summarized thusly:

"The revelation that philosophy finds nothingness at the end of it's quest informs the new philosopher that mythmaking must be his central concern in order to make a world."

Once God and Religion are gone, there is a vacuum that must be filled by myth, because man does not live by mere fact.

The first time I read this book, I struggled mightily with it -- and was not sure that I got it at all, but it made me aware that in my single minded focus to attain a career through college education, I had completely missed even a rudimentary understanding of the culture that had created the world I was intent to seek my livelihood in with all haste.

When I re-read it ... I assume in the late '90s, I was better equipped and felt that I understood it, this time it was a relative breeze. Education does work -- even autodidacticism.

My false memories were related to how early I thought it was written and that I must have read it sooner -- I thought it was written in the 1960's, it was published in '87. It DOES cover a lot of discussion of the '60s, which is where I must have gotten the idea.

It was more popular than I imagined -- I read it on the Kindle this time which included an afterword by Andrew Ferguson. Bloom died of AIDs in 1992, five years after the book was published. That fact no doubt figures heavily into some of the criticism of the work out in Wikipedia (linked at the top) relative to people claiming that young people coming out for gay rights and "marriage" is "proof of morality". One would hope that anyone who read the book would realize that it is rather proof of "all things being relative" in the now even more closed American mind.

Must all alcoholics be in favor of prohibition or of complete license to consume alcohol? Must all alcoholics hold any specific view relative to alcohol? Why would not the same be true of someone with homosexual tendencies? Will we someday state of alcoholics as a group that "You are born with a genetic disposition to alcoholism. If you do not drink, you are not being true to yourself"?

Such inconsistency -- and in fact, the creation of a mind so closed that it may not dare recognize the inconsistency in the previous paragraph is the core of what "Closing" teaches. The actual open mind is open to the possibility of truth, error and even paradox. It is willing to continue to seek "the good", even transcendent, divine truth rather than be closed to even the potential. It may not find what it seeks, but it does not discount it, and it does not give up the quest because the current times assert it MUST not exist.

I'm glad that I came full circle and re-read this one probably for the last time. It opened my mind, and the mind of America has closed beyond what I suspect even Bloom might have imagined since his death.

Moving Extreme

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/10/who-you-callin-extreme.php

Good PL post relative to a study that shows (unsurprisingly) that when Republicans are called "extreme", it is relative to CURRENT Democrats -- which have moved FAR to the left from what they were even ten or twenty years ago ... witness Hillary tacking LEFT to compete with Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, while her husband Bill, tacked RIGHT and the whole Democrat push of the '90s was CENTRIST!

Not anymore ... it is now EXTREME! The assumption of the left or "progressive" view is that a nation ALWAYS moves left -- moving left, to more government, more control, more regulation, less personal freedom in every area save morality, etc is "progress". The left assumes that the ultimate state of mankind must be absolute control from a centralized authority with all people living in some relation to that authority -- both enslaved and completely dependent at the same time (which is a definition of slavery).

The assumption though is that if you "properly educate" the masses, that total enslavement to a collective cause is the proper state of the mass of humanity -- once people are "sufficiently educated", they will willingly salute their complete dependence for everything including their daily direction from the state. This has all been covered in plenty of fictional works -- from Orwell's "1984" to Huxley's "Brave New World", as well as in plenty of works of non-fiction -- "The Gulag Archipelago" leaps to mind, as well as the excellent reality fiction "The Lives of Others" about East Germany.

This constant slide to the left has been going on in this country at least since Wilson, and really before. It is enough to make one wonder if it really and truly actually is inevitable!

The Immigration Drive of '65

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 -- Its Effect Today | National Review Online:

Excellent article covering the 1965 Immigration Reform that I covered here ... losing America to cultural and racial overrun was not inevitable. The left claims one of its favorite reasons for the outcome "unintended consequences" -- like their poverty programs destroying the inner city family, their economic programs destroying the economy, their social programs driving the nation to destruction by debt -- the programs of the left are FAMOUS for "unintended consequences". They always find them "surprising", but if you read of some of their leaders, like Saul Alinsky, it certainly looks like the damage they do is actually by design!

A worthy though somewhat pedantic read on how our culture was changed by legal invasion.

The article seems to think it can be fixed now -- unfortunately, looking at the demographics and birth rate,  that hardly seems likely.

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Pleading The 97%

Climate Change -- Statistics Aren't What They Seem | National Review Online:

One is reminded of a witness consistently pleading the 5th Amendment -- or my only pleading for my sins, "I plead the Blood of Christ"!

If you send up someone to talk about Climate Change at a Senate hearing, doesn't it reflect pretty badly on the cause at hand -- maybe unless it is a religion, which really ought to be considered, if the only response the witness has is to plead a completely bogus statistic? (covered in the past here)

It is worth following the link and seeing the idiotic responses on video ... and a more detailed explanation on where the 97% comes from than mine of you care. I guess after the stench of BO we are a people with no potential for embarrassment.

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SNL Contributes, Citizens United

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-goldberg-1011-20151010-story.html

The headline on the Daily Beast's review summed it up well: "'Saturday Night Live' Premiere Basically a Hillary Clinton Campaign Ad." And, as the Daily Beast's senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon notes, it wasn't just the skit with Ms. Clinton's walk-on that was a gift. It was almost the whole show.

The preponderance of left leaning thought in the MSM is well known -- this just happens to be a fairly egregious example, but as the few people of conservative views that listen to some NPR, look at NYTs, etc, know, the daily drip-drip-drip of story selection and dutiful left only views probably has greater effect.

Again, "Saturday Night Live" has the same First Amendment rights as The New York Times and The Washington Post. But you know who else has the same free-speech rights as the mainstream media? You and me — and George Soros, Charles and David Koch and every other citizen of the United States.

It would seem that any "fair minded person" would conclude that if the rights of the first amendment apply to partially corporations like "The Corporation for Public Broadcasting", NBC, CBS, NYTs, etc, etc, then it would obviously apply to individuals and other private corporations. Public Broadcasting even picks up a very partisan half billion or so from the government -- more in Minnesota. For some reason, the left assumes that only private money carries the "follow the money" admonition. Public money is free from any special interest from its beneficiaries.

In the arguments before the court, the Obama administration took the position that the government could even ban books during election season if those books amounted to "express advocacy" for a candidate, even if that advocacy took the form of a single mention of a candidate. 

The court rejected that argument, and President Obama, along with most liberals, have never forgiven the justices. Hillary Clinton is so opposed to the ruling, she has made amending the First Amendment a cornerstone of her campaign.

The Democrats hate the First Amendment relative to politics rather more than they hate the 2nd -- for if they get their way on the 1st, the level of their control ratchets up significantly. They demand nothing less than government control of political speech -- where the vast 99% Democrat unionized federal bureaucracy reviews all political materials, broadcasts, books, contributions, etc to make sure that they were "proper".

In their world, we will have achieved "fairness" when this blog is censored -- which in this case, would mean "removed" for anything other than just my personal observations on life. My views are clearly not in proper support of THE PARTY!

Shrinking US, The Desert Classic In Syria

U.S. Sees Russian Drive Against CIA-Backed Rebels in Syria - WSJ:

How many times did we see headlines hammering on any "failed" W foreign policy during the W administration?  Harry Reid said that Iraq was lost in April of 2007 even STILL, with BO screwing up on Iraq beyond the maximum anyone could imagine, it isn't completely lost even YET! This video needs to be etched in EVERYONE's MIND ... it is the "essence of BO".

But one thing we never lacked was extremely direct, if not completely insane and over the top criticism of every single move that the W administration made.  The press was totally energized -- casualties, territory losses, criticisms or challenges from foreign governments, accidents, costs -- the list was literally endless, and the drumbeat of criticism never ended. If the press treated both sides the same way, this would be appropriate for an "adversarial press" (perhaps with a bit less false and over the top reporting as per W years).

How different it is for BO. Here is a paragraph from the linked column ...

U.S. officials say they now believe the Russians have been directly targeting CIA-backed rebel groups that pose the most direct threat to Mr. Assad since the campaign began on Wednesday, both to firm up regime positions and to send a message to Mr. Obama’s administration.

There you have it ... just the facts, and pretty muted with very few headlines. BO established a policy that he claimed was a success in Yemen, it wasn't, and not only fails miserably in Syria, the Russians kill the few rump forces that policy trained just so everyone gets to see how truly hapless the US is. This is the moral equivalent of the Jimmuh Carter Desert Classic! America is destroyed at home and an object of derision on the world stage!

Does anybody remember BO snarkily telling Romney that "the 1980's want their foreign policy back"?

Is it petty to bring it up? SURE ... but really, just how many times did you see or hear "Mission Accomplished" ... the ship's banner, meaning the mission of the SHIP had been accomplished, but never the less, a meme that was used by the media to maximum advantage against W.

When the shoe is on the other foot, the story is MIA, even when it is completely true and it was BO's words and he really and snarkily meant it! Even in the right wing press doesn't come even close to the day by day cynical attack that W suffered under for 8 long years on issue after issue -- sometimes real, but in many cases fake.

It is insanely biased, but it is just the way it is.



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BO Roseburg, Using the Dead

Obama visit to Roseburg stirs local anger about his support for gun control after shooting | OregonLive.com:

It is hard to find any reporting of the fact that many of the people of Roseburg OR are not happy to see BO swoop in and use their dead as political props for his ideas on gun control. It makes me think back to a piece I wrote in 2010 while the media was coming unglued about BO having any opposition at all -- the Tea Party.

W had plenty of opposition from day 1 -- we heard about him being appointed rather than elected, Cheney and Halliburton, his supposed stupidity, etc -- from day 1. There were ZERO concerns in the media about "he is the President, he ought to be supported". Opposition was patriotic in those days!

Even in the 2004 election, when W included pictures from 9-11 into campaign material, the media went wild -- "using the tragedy for politics" was unseemly, and "the wound was too fresh".

BO? Completely different -- he makes a habit of using mass shootings for politics and even when locals don't enjoy what he is doing it simply isn't a story.

Yet another case of the vast bulk of people being led by the media narrative to completely different mental pastures depending on the spin. It is impossible to not be led unless you REALLY pay attention here, because they operate just like a master magician with indirection, misdirection, alternative story lines and any mechanism at all they can use to make the masses buy into what they are selling.

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Republican Frustration ... Talk!

http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/opinion/columnists/2015/10/01/thomas-sowell-good-riddance/73151748/

A very astute one from Sowell. Republicans have to accept that the vast majority of the media and even more of the university intelligentsia are going to be totally against anything they do. If they want people to see their case they have to MAKE THE CASE THEMSELVES! Which is yet another reason that Boehner has been such a disaster.

Today’s Republicans who proclaim a need to “reach out” to a wider constituency almost invariably mean pandering to those groups’ current beliefs, not showing them how your agenda and your principles — if you have any — apply to their situation and to the good of the country. 

You won’t swing a whole constituency of Democrats your way, and neither did Ronald Reagan. But he swung enough of them to win elections and to force Congressional Democrats to respect the “Reagan Democrats” he had won over.

We all know that Bill Clinton was the last president to balance the budget. Small problem, it WAS NOT Clinton, but rather the Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich that accomplished the task -- and took the hits for the "cuts" in the RATE OF GROWTH of some of the budget, especially Medicare. Gingrich as a good enough spokesman that at least those of us who pay a lot of attention know the truth. Even the BEST of Republican spokesman are going to fall short of having NBC, ABC, CBS, NY Times, CNN, etc, etc against them -- but you MUST TRY!

As Sowell points out, Boehner didn't even manage to mumble. It turns out that the much hated "sequester" and "government shutdowns" for which the Republicans were thoroughly castigated have resulted in some actual (though smaller than any conservative would desire) budget reductions.

The $150 billion budget decline of 4% is the first time federal expenditures have fallen for two consecutive years since the end of the Korean War.

Compared to spending in the $3.5T area per year, $150B is chicken feed, BUT! NOBODY ... not Reagan nor Newt ever REDUCED Federal spending for two years since the Korean War! Admittedly, it was "reduced" from such obscene ridiculous procine levels as to be completely beyond belief due to the election of BO and Democrats having a 60 vote Senate + the House, but STILL! 

But, as Sowell correctly points out, effectively nobody knows ... I'm an idiot that reads and Googles too much. 

What is the sound of the budget dropping if there isn't anyone in the woods to hear it?

Calling Ben Carson a 'Coon' Ok?

Ben Carson Called 'Coon' by Ivy League Professor for NASCAR Comments | National Review Online:



Looks likely ... he is a conservative, she is a black liberal.



The Oregon shooter was the same race was whatever BO is ... BO's mom was white, dad black. Shooter's mom black, dad white -- but at least the LA Times tried to make him a WHITE Supremacist, and his race and his mother's race seem to approach state secrets. Looks like another Zimmerman "white hispanic" situation.



Race, gender, "hate speech", wealth, truth  -- everything has become infinitely malleable in the service of the narrative of The Party and it's media. We're definitely beyond the looking glass into a world where everything means precisely what The Party says it does -- no more, no less.



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Oregon, Lost and Evil

Another Grim Benchmark in Chicago's Record Year of Gun Violence - The Atlantic:

Our nation was founded by very decent people -- the vast majority were Christian, many of the founders at the time were "Deists" -- believers that a sovereign God created an ordered universe and then just stood back, but event they asserted that our nation could not be government under the principles they put in place without faith in God and religion. John Adams stated it directly:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

We are no longer that nation -- we are a lost nation that has abandoned its heritage and culture and now attempts to base most of our lives on pleasure, leisure, human developed ideals (like "environmentalism"), ill defined utopian dreams like "diversity", consumption, greed, adherence to political and popular causes (like gay "marriage", etc). Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Yeats may have said it best of all ... interestingly, a "gyre" is a historical cycle of about 2000 years.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The linked article at the top points out that in the past two weekends in Chicago, the toll is 13 dead and 98 wounded. Chicago has record gun violence again this year. As I've covered before, those lives do not advance The Party (TP-D) narrative that the ONLY thing that can be done in EVERY case is to add more government.  Illinois and Chicago in particular have some of the most draconian gun laws in this country. So such violence tends to not get a lot of national attention -- we are to avert our eyes.

The toll included four men killed and at least 53 people wounded between Friday evening and early Monday morning, according to police. Last weekend, nine people were killed and at least 45 were wounded.

When a nation is evil and lost, having leadership even remotely connected to any reality is impossible. The blind demand to be led by the blind. This is what BO had to say yesterday -- complete remarks here:

We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don't work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.

He is totally and provably wrong. He is stating the OPPOSITE of the truth and in general nobody is calling him on it! Can he really be that disconnected? My God, he came from Chicago, he lives in DC, he HAS to know that the US cities with the harshest gun laws are the HIGHEST in gun deaths! He is directly and 100% lying to our faces and it isn't even newsworthy!

So the rest of his speech is completely based on a lie. It assumes that some set of laws is going to keep people safer -- but as I've pointed out before, the US is the 111th worst country in the world relative to the  murder rate, more like 200th in the world if you take out the big US cities controlled by TP. Would you REALLY be less dead if murdered with something other than a gun?

Our nation is being consumed by evil. We have always had plenty of guns, and in fact, our murder rate has actually gone down as the number of guns has gone up, but as the poem says, our ears can mostly no longer hear the truth at all.

BO didn't wait to find out that the shooter was half black (like BO himself), that he asked victims their religion and shot the ones that were Christian, and CERTAINLY not how it was that he got his guns. His only care was POLITICAL (as always) and himself ... he referred to himself 28 times in the short speech.

The big legislation that BO has proposed before is to close the ability of private gun owners to make a sale without a background check. To date, not a SINGLE one of the mass killings has resulted from such a sale (the guns used in Oregon were obtained with background check)! Certainly many of the 6,000 young black men killed each year by gun violence in our major cities are killed with illegally obtained guns -- but most of them are already engaged in drug, gang or other criminal activity, so would not be affected by laws. Criminals break laws ... that is why we call them criminals.

The deeper problem, with the deaths of the young black men, the Oregon shooter, and of BO's remarks is that of evil. The willingness to take life or allow lives to be taken for selfish purposes, the willingness to lie to gain power or advantage. We have destroyed our claim to being a "moral and religious people" in so many ways -- abortion, gay "marriage" and the overall destruction of the family, robbing the productive and rewarding the unproductive -- the list is long, but the bottom line is that we once had a strong American culture in which truth, individual responsibility, faith in God, family, hard work and an optimistic view of the future justified by those values was shared by the vast majority of the country. We destroyed that culture, and we increasingly see the fruits of that.

We have abandoned our center (God, religion, culture), and thus could no longer be governed by what is left of our tattered Constitution even if it could be recovered. Much like the various shooters, we have generally become evil and lost as a nation. Our "leader" certainly embodies that for all to see.

We got sick in the 60's and 70's and revived a bit under Reagan in the '80s. Could we revive again? I certainly hope and pray we do, but it becomes harder and harder to envision the deeper we sink. May God have mercy on our souls and the souls of all those lost in Oregon, Chicago, Afghanistan, the Middle East ... and the increasing chaos likely to come.
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50 Years of Democrats Selecting Voters

Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act: The War On America Turns 50 | VDARE - premier news outlet for patriotic immigration reform:

Fifty years ago this week Teddy Kennedy and the Democrats passed legislation that moved America from being a predominantly European ancestry, to a nation that looked more like the rest of the planet  (other than Europe) -- predominantly non-white.

The fact of the legislation having the effect of changing American demographics and thereby culture is not in question -- "The Party" (TP-D) would say that "we were just unaware what would happen". Ignorance is always possible, but it was certainly willful ignorance if so, Customs and Immigration Services knew what was going to happen.

In 1965, the political elite on Capitol Hill may not have predicted a mass increase in immigration. But Marian Smith, the historian for Customs and Immigration Services, showed me a small agency booklet from 1966 that certainly did. It explains how each provision in the new law would lead to a rapid increase in applications and a big jump in workload — more and more so as word trickled out to those newly eligible to come.

In any case, it produced the country that used to be America that now sits between Canada and Mexico. A country with no identifiable people, culture, religion or shared values. A country whose only definition is geography and the fact that it is divided.

Republicans should be sweeping the country, but they aren’t, because of Kennedy’s immigration law. Without post-1965 immigrants bloc-voting for the Democrats, Obama never would have been elected president, and Romney would have won a bigger landslide against him in 2012 than Reagan did against Carter in 1980.

In 1965, TP was in total control of the country. I consider myself pretty well read, but I never understood exactly why my old home town is heavily Somalian, why the Twin Cities and even Rochester have large Somali populations, nor why every small town in IA has a decent Mexican restaurant. I thought it was somehow "unavoidable" given very long term US immigration policy -- as if the same laws that brought Germans, Swedes, Irish, etc just naturally allowed the Mexican, Somali, etc immigration we have seen in the last 50 years.

It wasn't, it was a specific decision made by specific people -- the Kennedy's being chief among them. Like a lot of TP actions, it was promised to be completely different than what happened, but in a rational world, we would evaluate politicians by what actually happens rather than what they promise will happen.

Here is what LBJ had to say when he signed the bill.

"This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions," Johnson said at the signing ceremony. "It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power."

I guess he was right about it not adding to our wealth or power!

TP firmly tells us through media and education that there is nothing that can be done about this now. It is over -- what was once America is dead and gone, and they and the people they have selected as voters are fast creating whatever they want to call the new nation. The culture will be what they say it is -- atheist, Muslim, totalitarian, 3rd world -- whatever. Those of us anachronisms that remember the old America need to just sit back and accept it. 

They may well be right -- but at least it is good to know exactly who it was, and when it was that they decided to stick the knife in the eagle.

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Pope Loses PC Sainthood

How Pope Francis Undermined the Goodwill of His Trip and Proved to Be a Coward | Michelangelo Signorile:



The Pope may be "the Vicar of Christ" to Catholics, but even to them he is far less than Christ. If you are Catholic, you may be "supposed" to support the Pope in all he says and does, but as he is human, as are his followers, so we know that doesn't happen either.



For Christians, Christ came to allow us to serve the Hebrew God of all without being Jewish and under Jewish Law. Salvation, redemption, communion, forgiveness, Christian love, and being blood brothers and sisters in Christ's blood. That is God's plan -- but as we all know, just as in Catholics supporting the Pope, the plan and the implementation that imperfect humans are able to carry out vary a good deal.



Secular Humanism is a religion with no forgiveness nor even hint of being non-judgemental on its tenets both great and small, as the reaction from the left to the visit to Davis shows. Thou shalt tow the line of Political Correctness and all other tenets of the secular faith, or thou wilt be purged to outer darkness!



As a Christian however, the Pope would be well within his calling to meet with Davis even if he thought her stand completely wrong. There is no question that she has been imprisoned, attacked and threatened by the culture in which she lives. Christians are called to "visit those in prison" -- not because they may not be in prison for totally justified reasons, but simply because they are in prison. Christ didn't come to minister to the righteous, but to the ungodly.



It seems clear however that Francis visited her because he finds conscientious objection to actions of the state based on religious belief to be a human right. The left finds nearly every sort of conscientious objection to the state to be a "human right" when it comes to gun control, anti-war protests, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, drug "smoke ins", animal rights protests, environmental protests, etc. -- it is just religion as a basis for objection that they find to be objectionable, and even then, really only CHRISTIAN religion -- Muslims can avoid baking all the cakes they want.



Intellectually, those on the right now trying to canonize this Pope of the basis of a visit to Kim Davis are guilty of the same sort of one dimensional cheerleading / demonizing as the left is from the other direction. Catholicism is IN GENERAL a conservative force since it stands for the basic wisdom of the fear of God -- thereby taking man out of the false position of being "the measure of all things". This Pope has been taken in by the false doctrine of "Liberation Theology", but not to the extent that God is removed and "faith" becomes merely a social construct.



It is OK to chortle a bit at the lunacy of the left as long as we keep our minds clear as to the reality of the situation. Conservative Christians ought to see him as what he is -- a man in a powerful position, a mixed bag that has aspects of both sinner and saint as do we all.



The Secular Humanists will continue to frequently anoint new messiahs and judge new devils -- constant evidence of the futility of their faith in the forever retreating utopian future.



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